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January 23, 2012

The Iron Sheep has landed! Location information for the event

We are happy to announce that we have finalized a location for Iron Sheep. It will take place at Pivotal Labs located at 841 Broadway, Eighth Floor, New York City. (nearby subway stops are 14th Street - Union Square for the L, N, Q, R, 4, 5, and 6 lines, see google map). Many thanks to the good folks of Pivotal Labs (especially Josh Knowles and Magda Kozak) for providing the space and Javier de la Torre for making the connection.

We're quite excited about all who have registered and there is still space available (you can register here). Please contact email us (zook [at] uky.edu) if you have any questions.

A panel discussion of the event will take place at the AAG conference at 8 am on Tuesday (Feb 28th) in Conference Room E, Lower Level, Sheraton Hotel

Overview of the "Iron Sheep"Event

Pack up your laptop, grab your data and head to New York for the first annual "lightning mapping of user generated information" event. Dubbed Iron Sheep (at least until someone objects) the event seeks to mimic the format of the “Iron Chef” television series. This workshop challenges participants (grouped into teams with members from diverse backgrounds and skill sets) to produce meaningful analysis and fun, evocative mash-ups from the same sets of user-generated, geo-coded data within a four hour time frame. The goal is to provide a semi-structured environment where participants can socialize and work in a fun yet socially meaningful project. Participants will be drawn from academic, industry and artistic communities from around the world.

Teams will be assigned a targeted question (e.g., What is the most “out of shape” location in the U.S.? or How can we visualize the Occupy Wall Street movement? or Where is the most likely place for the zombie apocalypse to start? or Where is the origin and destination of Super PAC money?) and use crowdsourced data to create a new geo-visualization. Teams can also choose their own questions. The exact questions and datasets depends on the participants who join (see below).

* Will attend the panel on Tuesday but not the "lighting mapping" event on Sunday

How to attendThis event is open (register here) although the price of entry is that each participants contributes a dataset that is not commonly available (ideally crowdsourced) or one that has been enhanced in a meaningful and useful way. Data that is relatively comprehensive for the U.S. or world would work best, although something focused specifically on New York City would be appropriate as well. The goal is to have enough commonality between datasets that it is possible to do mashups. There will also likely be a "secret sauce" dataset (again borrowing from the Iron Chef idea) that all mappers would be challenged to include.

The organizers will likely be contributing the following data sets:

The retail cost of marijuana at the city, county and state level (based on PriceofWeed.com reports);

Busted meth labs;

Some slice of geo-coded tweets;

Serious or offbeat datasets are both extremely welcome as we are hoping for the serendipity that comes from the new mashing of data – such as the Beer Belly of America. For example, we'd love to end up with a combination of data sets that includes things like: